This World Which Is Not My Own
by Argyle.S
Summary: After the Crisis, Things are Different.


Notes: I couldn't sleep. This happened.

* * *

Billions of universes, gone, consumed, washed away in a wave of antimatter destruction. Trillions of lives gone in the blink of an eye. Out of all the universes, out of all the timelines, only one remains standing, and Kara is unlucky enough to be in it. She feels guilty for feeling that way, feels guilty for wishing she could trade her life for Oliver's, for wishing she could join her family in Rao's light. She feels guilty that out of all of the trillions and trillions of trillions of lives lost to the monstrosity that called itself the Anti-Monitor, she only mourns for one.

She feels guilty, even, for mourning that one.

When she gets up in the morning half an hour early, so she can meet Alex for breakfast, when they joke and laugh and play, she feels guilty for the moments when the joke should land, but it doesn't, and in that moment she hates Alex just a little for not being the right Alex. For not being her Alex.

When they curl up on sister nights to watch a movie, she feels guilty for the moments when Alex's arm doesn't lay right across her back, but instead sits just a little to high, and Kara has to bite back tears, because her Alex, the real Alex, would hold her just right, and she hates this fake for being there when the real one isn't.

When the Alex who is not her Alex finds her curled in a back corner of her apartment, tucked in between the bed and the wall, crying inconsolably, and takes her into an embrace that's not quite right, not quite perfect, Kara hates her because she isn't home. Not the way Alex was. The real Alex. Her Alex.

When she pulls away, and starts to avoid the Alex who is not her Alex, and the fake Alex comes for her, to find her, to fix whatever is wrong, Kara hates her a little more because she can't tell her the truth.

How can you tell someone you're not who you are, and they are not who they are? How can she tell this Alex who is not Alex that she's not really Alex, or at leas not the right Alex? How can she tell someone she loves, because she loves every Alex simply because they are Alex, that she hates her for not being the right Alex, and wishes she had died instead?

She begins to wonder if she's gotten it wrong. If maybe it's not the wrong Alex who survived, but the wrong Kara. Maybe she was meant for the void, and this Alex's Kara was meant to be the one who lived, who endured.

She remembers what Mar Novu said about the universe being a delicate machine, about how balance must be maintained, and she begins to wonder if she'll be the reason everything they sacrificed for comes undone. Because if she's the wrong Kara, and she must be, then the universe is out of balance, and she has to fix it. She has too.

So she begins to plot.

She begins to plan.

There is not a multiverse anymore, but Kara remembers. Kara was to be the youngest member of the Kryptonian science guild ever. Kara was a born engineer. Her skills might have gotten rusty on a backwater world where technology was barely evolved past stone knives and animal skins, but she had not been able to resist having a look inside Cisco's dimensional extrapolator when she'd first gotten it. She rebuilds it from memory. She tunes it to home. To Earth 38. To a universe which does not and can not exist anymore, and she turns it on.

All of reality shivers, as if Kara had spoken the true name of the human devil, and like that saying the humans are so fond of using, she spoke of the devil, and the devil appeared. He appeared in the form of an angry god, filled with rage at the risk Kara had taken of undoing the fusion of the worlds, but Kara had faced down a god before and struck him nearly dead. She looks into the face of this one full of anger and fury, and she tells him that there has been a mistake. That she's wrong. That the wrong Kara survived. That the universe is out of balance, and he has to fix it.

He looks at her with understanding, and with pity as he tells her that the universe it not out of balance. That all is as it was meant to be.

Kara looks at him and says this can't be right. That this can't be the way things were supposed to be. That she was supposed to be with her Alex, the real Alex. That this world's Kara should be with this world's Alex.

The god looks on, and he sees her pain, and he takes pity on her. He says that she is needed here. That she must be here, because this world's Kara could never endure what is to come. He tells her that, if she wishes, a trade could be made. This world's Alex for hers. This world's Alex would join her Kara in the beyond, and her Alex would take her place.

Kara hesitates for a moment, feeling the weight of what is being offered. She senses the trap in his words, and she asks him what the price would be. How would he balance the scales? He tells her the price is whatever the universe requires. It seems like a small price, though she knows when the time comes it will not be, but she doesn't care. She can have her home back.

The god nods his head, understanding that she's agreed without her having to say it. He leaves, and twenty minutes later, Kara's door opens, and this time, when Alex hugs her, it's right, it's perfect, it's home. When she looks into Alex's eyes, she can see it. Alex knows the truth. She knows this isn't their world, but she hugs Kara so tightly, that it doesn't seem to matter.

It does matter, a few weeks later, when Alex shows up on her door with a suitcase. It does matter when she feels the guilt, because Alex can't bring herself to touch the woman who is not her girlfriend, even if they share the same face, the same voice, the same name and so many of the same memories.

It matters, when they both start to realize that neither of them really fit. That everything about this remade world is off. The corners and the edges are all in the wrong places, and they only place they fit is together, two round pegs clinging to each other in a world of square holes.

Kara wonders, sometimes, if Alex resents her for it. If Alex hates her for forcing her to live in a world where she can never be at homes. It's almost two years before she gets the courage to ask, and Alex looks at her and shakes her head and tells Kara that she's the only home Alex has ever needed.

It's another year before they slip over the line neither of them knew they'd been inching towards. The isolation, the mutual need, of the only two people living in a world filled with ghosts and shadows sends them back to each other for everything. They move from friend and sisters to loves and wives because who else is there for them, if not each other?

They worry about it, both of them. They wonder if it's really love, or if the other is sacrificing what they want to satisfy their needs, but days and weeks and months of reassurance turn into years of comfort and decades of security. They fight the good fight, they adopt children and raise them, they make the world a better place, until the day comes to balance the scales.

Alex slips away gently in her sleep. She's ninety-six years old, and it's not unexpected. Kara still doesn't look a day over twenty-five, but she'd made the decision long ago. The pod is waiting with a course set for a red star two thousand light years from earth. She's sleep along the way, and wake up in Rao's light.

Alex's body already in the pod, ready for the journey home, when Mar Novu appears, and tells her he has come to collect, and when she asks him what bargain she's made, he tells her the horrible truth. Like Oliver, her bargain was time. He gave his away. She weighed herself down with more.

Kara cries as she sends Alex ahead. She whispers the prayers, and for two weeks, she does nothing but mourn for her life, her love, her home. For her Alex.

And then, she pays the price for her need. For two centuries, she fights, she endures, she becomes Mar Novu's champion. And when she final falls, victorious, but grievously wounded staving off Darkseid's latest attempt to conquer the Universe, it's Mar Novu himself that sends her to Rao, whispering the prayers for the woman who has been away from home so long.

And Kara passes her time in darkness, so scared, so afraid during her passage, wondering if she's lost herself in the phantom zone again, until she's surrounded by light and warmth. She opens her eyes and sees them all. Oliver and Barry, and Eliza and her mother and her father and Astra and Kal and Lois and Winn and Brainy and Kate and Lucy and Cat and Carter and J'onn and M'gann and James and Kelly and even Lena is there, but she looks and looks, becoming more and more desperate, until familiar arms wrap around her from behind, and a familiar voice asks what took her so long. She smiles as she turns around, and enfolds Alex in her arms, home at last.


End file.
